Pages

Friday, June 5, 2015

Life on the Dead Chicken Ranch

People often ask about the writer’s life. Some will tell you
it’s glamour, glamour, glamour. Hey, who am I to argue? (Excuse me while I mop
up the coffee that just got spewed on my computer monitor.)

The other delusion I have to squash is this “homeschool”
thing that we do here on the Dead Chicken Ranch while I’m living this
glamorous writer life. I begin to see the image others have by the questions
they ask. “Do you have a classroom in your home dedicated to homeschooling? How
are your children socialized? How do you test them and meet typical standards?”
I think they credit me with more than I’m capable of delivering. I would love to
paint you a picture of our homeschooling endeavors that resemble a Little House
on the Prairie standard, but alas…

It makes perfect sense that folks would expect it to look at
least something like typical school. I can assure you, homeschool looks as
different in each home as there are homeschoolers. I don’t deserve the
accolades that so many have offered. “I don’t know how you do it? I know I
could never….” Yeah. I couldn’t do it either.

We don’t call it the Dead Chicken Ranch for nothing. (I
guess you could call that a biology project gone full-circle. I’d like to say “no
animals were harmed,” but… sigh.

Then there was the ecology project that was launched when my
son decided that his 10cent feeder fish needed a larger habitat. Three hundred
dollars and a twelve foot, hand-dug pond later, we would call that a success if
not for the heron that showed up at the end of the summer and cleaned us out.

Most recently, we’ve been taking a more traditional route. The
graphic design certificate program was MY idea. I wanted to take the classes,
but DS decided that now, after years of spurning anything that resembled
traditional school, he’s crashing my party. So for the past two semesters, my
son, my baby, my 6ft. 6in. 16 year old, is taking classes with his mommy at the
local community college.

It’s a hoot. We hit the vending machine before class. We share the same text book. And my son can help his old mother with her homework. And THAT is what homeschool looks like here on the Dead Chicken Ranch… and that’s what a
writer’s life looks like too. I write. I drink my coffee. Some days, we stay in
our jammies and binge on movies, (based on Jane Austen novels, of course). We just finished
cleaning the fish pond. (We have three new fishies – Blossom, Buttercup and
Bubbles.) Now, I make time for graphic design classes in and around writing…
and THAT is a writer’s life. I love to hear about yours!

Sofie Couch writes sweet romance with just enough piss and vinegar to make you spew your coffee and test your bladder control. From her home in Central Virginia, she writes in and around raising a “pa’r-a-normal young adults”, wrangling chickens amidst nightly coyote raids, and living a romantic comedy with her sweetie-pie of twenty years. She studied Rhetoric at the University of Virginia to obtain a B.A. in b.s. and fiction is what she continues to crank out with the help of her writing muses – a dog that thinks she’s a cat, a cat that thinks she’s the alpha dog, and 1,000 (fictitious) Typing Monkeys, (which also just happens to be the name of her blog). You can follow the high-jinks of Sofie and her menagerie at http://www.sofiecouch.blogspot.com .

7 comments:

Love it, Sophie. Last school year, when my daughter and family were in Guam, I was my granddaughter's high school "English teacher." She picked out a series of books to read, and I found reader discussion questions online for them. She sent me her answers. I read them for critical thinking and corrected the writing as a grammar lesson. We had a good time with it.

Cudos on the "homeschool" English! That sounds like a great way to spend time with your granddaughter!Re: chickens. :( Yep. We were hit by coyotes... multiple times. Sigh. But we've moved on. It's all fishies for us from now on. :)

My writing life? I get up, check email and the internet; have an English muffin & some tea; procrastinate, check the internet; write a bit; procrastinate; write a bit more; procrastinate a bit more; trip to the mailbox; run into neighbor; chat; procrastinate a bit; write a bit more; rummage the cabinets for chocolate, etc., etc., etc.

Sofie, to another writer your life seems pretty normal -- except, of course, for the dead chickens, hand-dug pond, etc. LOL. Now that our boys are grown and married and live away, home life is very calm. I miss the days of the drama of raising children.